FilmConvert Ex-Senior Color Engineer Sam Wiles teaches
Film Emulation
The Feel of Film Masterclass bridges the gap between film’s emotional allure and the scientific precision required to recreate it digitally. Led by Sam Wiles — former Senior Color Engineer at FilmConvert and current TV Drama & Documentary Colorist at Dock10 — this course takes students deep into the art and science of building authentic film emulation using native tools inside DaVinci Resolve.
Dec 06
LIVE Interactive Masterclass
Indistinguishable.
Shot on Real Film & Digital — for “The Feel of Film” Masterclass. A side-by-side comparison so identical, you’ll question which is which.
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Watch the 1-minute class trailer
Meet your
Instructor
Sam Wiles is an accomplished color science specialist and professional colorist with over a decade of experience spanning software development, technical innovation, and high-profile broadcast productions. His career bridges the worlds of camera technology, color science theory, and practical post-production, giving him a rare ability to combine deep technical expertise with creative application.
Technical Innovation & Development Leadership
As Senior Color Engineer and Camera Technician at FilmConvert from 2016 to 2022, Sam was a driving force in the development of two groundbreaking color tools that have transformed post-production workflows worldwide. He was instrumental in the development of CineMatch, a revolutionary camera-matching tool that solves one of the most persistent challenges in multi-camera productions. Additionally, Sam was integral to the development of FilmConvert Nitrate, an advanced film emulation upgrade that has become an industry standard for achieving authentic film aesthetics in digital productions.
His technical expertise extends to comprehensive color science knowledge, having personally gathered color data and generated custom LUT profiles for virtually every major camera system on the market. This hands-on work required meticulous attention to detail and a profound understanding of the unique color science architectures implemented by different manufacturers.
Industry Collaborations & Corporate Relationships
Throughout his career, Sam has cultivated professional relationships with leading camera manufacturers including Canon, Panasonic, and Sony, serving as a technical liaison for FilmConvert's corporate partnerships. This experience provided him with privileged insights into proprietary color science methodologies and developmental roadmaps for emerging capture technologies.
Broadcast & Production Experience
Currently serving as a Colorist at dock10, one of the UK's premier television facilities, Sam operates at the highest levels of broadcast color grading using industry-standard DaVinci Resolve and Baselight systems.
His impressive credit list spans multiple genres and broadcasters, including drama series like "Ridley" (ITV), "Waterloo Road" (BBC), and "Hollyoaks" (Channel 4); entertainment programming such as "Know Your Sh!t" (Channel 4); and documentary work including "The UK's National Parks with Caroline Quentin" (More4) and "Alpine Train at Christmas" (Channel 4).
Technical Proficiency & Post-Production Expertise
Sam possesses comprehensive mastery of the entire post-production color pipeline, from initial camera profiling through final delivery. His software expertise encompasses all major professional platforms including DaVinci Resolve, Baselight, Adobe Creative Suite (Premiere Pro & After Effects), and Final Cut Pro. This versatility ensures his teaching methodology remains platform-agnostic and applicable across varied technical environments.
Having transitioned from software development to high-end broadcast coloring, Sam offers a distinctive perspective that integrates deep technical understanding with practical creative application—a combination that makes his educational approach uniquely valuable for aspiring and professional colorists alike.
Take a Closer Look
Watch digital transform into film.
This short sequence follows the transformation of Blackmagic RAW test footage into a complete film emulation pipeline — from negative emulation through acutance, color cross-talk, halation, and Cineon transfer, culminating in the unmistakable look of print film.
Part 1: Introduction / Emotional Role of Film
The class opens with a reflection on why film continues to captivate us long after the rise of digital technology. Sam explores the emotional connection between the viewer and the image — how film’s organic texture, imperfections, and subtle softness evoke human warmth and authenticity.
Students learn how the physical medium of film shapes storytelling itself, influencing emotion, tone, and perception.
"The way a film camera records light onto its emulsion—that’s as close as you can get to the way the eye sees... It’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s extremely reliable"
-Christopher Nolan
When we watch films shot on celluloid, we respond to subtle qualities that may not be immediately obvious but affect us on a subconscious level.
As filmmaker Steven Spielberg noted, "A film is not what it is about, but how it is about it"—highlighting how technical choices including color treatment profoundly impact the emotional experience. The film medium itself brings a tangible quality to storytelling that digital workflows often strive to emulate.
This section also introduces the language of film aesthetics — terms like grain structure, halation, highlight roll-off, and texture — helping participants understand how filmmakers and colorists describe the expressive character of film. By the end of this segment, students will appreciate that film is not merely a recording medium, but a living, expressive art form that mirrors the way we perceive the world.
Part 2: Technical Theory: Film vs Digital
In this foundational section, Sam moves to the whiteboard to explain how film captures light differently from digital sensors and the human eye.
He illustrates the multiple layers of color film, each sensitive to a different wavelength of light. Typically, the top layer captures blue light, the middle layer captures green, and the bottom layer captures red. As light passes through these layers sequentially, it creates separate latent images in each layer that later develop into cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes.
Students will also explore the function of the anti-halation layer, which prevents light from reflecting off the film base and re-exposing the emulsion from behind. While this layer minimizes unwanted reflections, it still allows a degree of light scattering within the film structure—an optical behavior responsible for film’s graceful highlight handling, subtle color cross-talk, and the characteristic halation glow around bright areas.
Building on this foundation, students will examine the physics behind the photochemical process, comparing film’s non-linear density response to the linear light capture of digital sensors.
Sam demonstrates how these photochemical characteristics are translated into the digital realm through the Cineon log format—transforming the negative into a digital intermediate that can be accurately mapped back to print film within a closed-loop system. Students will also learn how modern digital workflows replicate this process using scene-referred color spaces and advanced color transforms to preserve film’s natural tonal and color behavior.
Students will also be introduced to key concepts such as Dmin, LAD patch, and Status M and will gain a clear understanding of how modern digital workflows replicate this pipeline using scene-referred color spaces and advanced transforms.
The segment concludes with a discussion on scene-referred versus perception-referred imagery, revealing how film inherently transforms reality into a perception-based representation that feels natural and emotionally resonant.
Scene-Referred vs. Perception-Referred Imagery
Students will learn how film inherently performs a form of tone mapping between the real world (scene-referred) and the way the human eye perceives it (perception-referred). Unlike digital sensors that capture scene-linear data requiring later transformation to appear natural, film’s chemical response curves automatically compress extreme brightness values while preserving mid-tone contrast. This non-linear response allows film to produce a perception-referred image organically—rendering light and tone in a way that aligns more closely with human visual experience.
The Gold Standard of Skin Tone
Film's handling of skin tones has long been considered superior to digital capture. The multilayer structure of color film emulsion naturally compresses the contrast in skin tones while maintaining subtle variations that contribute to a three-dimensional appearance. This creates the "golden" quality often associated with film portraits.
Students will also explore concepts such as mid-tone halation, which subtly influences skin tones by adding a gentle warmth and glow around facial features. Film’s non-linear response to different wavelengths of light further enhances its ability to reproduce subsurface scattering naturally, giving skin a sense of depth and vitality that digital capture must work hard to emulate.
This natural compression explains why film has remained the gold standard for many cinematographers—it captures reality not as it physically exists but as humans perceive it, with graceful highlight handling and pleasing color responses, especially in skin tones.
Part 3: Film Characteristics
In this section, students will examine the defining visual traits that give film its unmistakable character. The session begins with an exploration of film grain, where Sam explains how silver halide crystals form varying densities across tonal ranges, producing an organic texture that feels alive—unlike the uniformity of digital noise.
The discussion then moves to highlight roll-off, exploring how film’s natural “shoulder” curve compresses brightness to preserve detail and avoid harsh clipping. Students also learn about color cross-talk and halation — the soft, reddish glow around bright sources — and how it subtly affects color and warmth, especially in skin tones. The section continues with skin tone rendering and softness, analyzing how film achieves depth and dimension through acutance and optical diffusion rather than artificial sharpness. Each characteristic is tied back to its physical or chemical cause, giving students both artistic and scientific understanding of film’s visual magic.
Color Cross-talk
Highlight Roll-Off
Halation
Grain & Texture
Acutance & Callier Effect
Sam further explains Acutance—Film’s perceived softness arises more prominently from its grain structure and acutance—the contrast gradient at edges. Unlike digital noise, film grain is a three-dimensional matrix of silver halide crystals or dye clouds that optically diffuse fine details. Larger grains (e.g., in high-speed films like ISO 800) scatter light more aggressively, softening high-frequency details while preserving mid-frequency contrast.
Students will learn how acutance further distinguishes film from digital. Digital sharpening amplifies edge contrast uniformly, creating harsh, "overcooked" transitions. Film, however, modulates acutance through grain density: high-contrast edges attract denser grain clusters, enhancing perceived sharpness without artificial halos, while low-contrast areas retain a softer texture. This nuanced approach allows film to resolve details like eyelashes sharply while rendering skin tones with gentle gradations—a balance digital struggles to replicate without post-processing.
Sam also introduces the optical phenomenon behind color film’s layered structure. Color film comprises multiple emulsion layers, each sensitized to specific wavelengths: blue at the top, green in the middle, and red at the bottom. As light penetrates the emulsion, it scatters within the gelatin substrate before reaching the deeper layers. This scattering effect, known as Callier effect, is more pronounced in the red-sensitive layer due to its position: by the time light reaches the bottom red layer, it has already interacted with the blue and green layers, diffusing further and reducing high-frequency detail capture. It has been debated on whether this truly has any perceived effect on the look however one would argue it is a factor and must be some barring on the skin tones smoothing.
Building: Digital Negative Emulation
Building on the theoretical groundwork, this stage transitions into constructing the “Feel of Film” node tree from scratch — a structure designed to emulate how light physically passes through the emulsion layers of film.
The process begins by creating a Digital Negative scan that reproduces the tonal density characteristics of the Cineon format. It’s important to note that converting the image to a literal negative is both unnecessary and counterproductive; since the goal isn’t to replicate a specific film stock, introducing a negative stage only complicates adjustments and risks degrading image quality.
The node tree consists of 5 sections - Linearization, Blue layer, Green layer, Red Layer, Halation. Each group of emulsion layers will be restricted to its own RGB channel and has its own node to mimic the characteristics discussed in the course.
Transitioning from theory to practice, Sam introduces the project workflow inside DaVinci Resolve. Students set up a non–color-managed DaVinci YRGB project to maintain full control over each color channel and tonal response. Sam outlines the purpose of the upcoming emulation exercise — to conceptually recreate the structure of film emulsion rather than mimic a specific stock.
The node tree will be built progressively to mirror how light travels through the physical layers of film, helping students understand not just the “how” but the “why” behind every step. This section ensures that participants are comfortable with the technical foundation before beginning hands-on construction.
Building: Print Film Emulation
Once the digital negative emulation is complete, the workflow advances to creating a Print Film Emulation layer. Here, students replicate the final stage of the traditional film pipeline — converting Cineon log density data back into a pleasing display image.
Sam demonstrates how to apply stronger S-curves and controlled contrast to simulate the print film’s response, ensuring the halation and grain remain consistent and integrated. This process not only refines the emulation but also introduces the concept of a closed-loop system, mirroring how film intermediates maintained consistency between negative and print.
Applying Film Emulation to Stock Footage
With the full emulation node tree complete, Sam moves into practical application. Students apply their emulation to various stock footage examples, adjusting parameters to achieve balance across different scenes and lighting conditions. This segment emphasizes interpretation — understanding when to lean into imperfections, how to control halation strength, and how to adapt grain and tone for narrative intent. Through this exercise, participants develop both technical control and creative intuition, learning to translate film’s feel into real-world grading situations.
Who Should take this Class?
The Feel of Film is designed for anyone who loves the timeless look of film and wants to understand what truly gives it its unique visual and emotional character. Whether your goal is to build authentic film emulation using native tools in DaVinci Resolve, or to use your existing film emulation plugins with greater precision and intent, this class offers the scientific and artistic foundation you need.
Whether you’re a professional colorist, filmmaker, or student of post-production, this class will help you move beyond presets — learning to emulate film with intent, control, and authenticity.
Download Real 4K Film Scans
To make The Feel of Film a truly hands-on experience, we shot both real film and digital with our team in Spain and Romania. Every participant will receive access to the actual footage captured for this class — both the 16 mm film telecine transfer and the digital sequence. The film was shot on an Arriflex 16SR with Optar Illumina S16 T1.3 lenses using Kodak Vision3 7219 Color Negative Film, professionally developed and scanned at Cinelab Romania.
Director: Rafael Bernabeu Parreño | Cinematographers: Rafael Bernabeu Parreño & Rafael Bonet Martínez | Download File Size: 60.51 GB
The digital counterpart was shot on a Blackmagic camera in BRAW format, matched to the same lighting and setup for a genuine one-to-one comparison. Participants can download both sequences to follow along, experiment with the techniques demonstrated in the class, and create their own authentic film emulations — learning directly from real-world material, not simulated examples.
Invite-Only
This Masterclass is reserved exclusively for invite-holding participants and is not open for direct enrolment — If you’re genuinely interested, answer the questions at the end of this section and join our waitlist. Selected individuals will receive a personalized invite via email.
First Round
Invites
Selected waitlist individuals will receive an invite via email on Friday, Nov 14, 8:00 AM Pacific Time—Keep an eye on your inbox.
Waitlist Open.
$199 $249
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If you receive the invite, you will have a brief 24-hour window to claim your spot at the first round price of $199. Unclaimed spots will be released.
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